Dorothea C. Spellman (1907–1979) headed the group work specialization at the Graduate School of Social Work, University of Denver. Her primary contributions were in group work and as an advocate for a unified profession.
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Spellman, Dorothea C.
Maryann Syers
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Reproductive Health Justice
Silvia M. Chávez-Baray, Eva M. Moya, and Omar Martinez
Reproductive health endeavors in regard to prevention, treatment, and emerging disparities and inequities like lack of access to comprehensive and equitable reproductive health for immigrants and LGBTQ+ populations are discussed. Practice-based approaches for reproductive health justice and access care models, to advance reproductive justice, are included. Implications for macro social work practice and historical perspectives, practices, and social movements of reproductive health justice in the United States to promote reproductive health justice in the context of political, legal, health, and social justice efforts are salient to advance social justice.
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Social Work and Social Policy in Namibia
Priscilla A. Gibson, Janet Ananias, Rachel Freeman, and Namoonga Chilwalo
Social work and social policy are intertwined in the Republic of Namibia and heavily influenced by its complex colonial sociopolitical history, struggle for human rights, and progress toward social development. These factors inform how the social and human needs of Namibians are being met. A human rights lens was adopted in 1990 by a democratic government that guided the delivery of social services to a diverse ethnic population. Namibia has successfully integrated social work into its society, supported by (a) a social justice mandate, (b) a capacity-building framework, and (c) Vision 2030. Social and human service needs are provided naturally by indigenous families and communities, and formal services are provided by governmental and nongovernmental agencies. This article consists of an overview of the socio-historical and political contexts of social work and social policies in this emerging democracy, along with special attention to four challenging and interrelated areas of social work practice including poverty, language and national identity, intergenerational caregiving and the Coronavirus pandemic.
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Scott, Carl A.
Dorothy M. Pearson
Carl A. Scott (1928–1986) was assistant professor at the New York University School of Social Work. As a senior consultant on minority groups at the Council on Social Work Education he developed programs directed toward enhancing minority presence in curricula.
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Latinos and Latinas: Practice Interventions
Griselda Villalobos
A hallmark of the social work profession is the emphasis on social justice for all. A call to action for social workers is to understand the needs of racial and ethnic groups in order to provide effective interventions. Latina/os are a heterogeneous and highly complex population that presents the social work profession with challenges in understanding diversity and what constitutes culturally and linguistically competent social work interventions. Latina/os are the second-fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the United States. Latina/o groups must contend with strong anti-immigrant sentiment, English-only legislation, and increased discrimination and racism in the United States. Social workers need to work to reduce both external and internal institutional barriers to service delivery for Latina/os while responding effectively to their interpersonal and familial needs.
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Parker, Norma Alice
Carolyn Noble
Norma Parker (1906–2004) is generally regarded as one of the founders of social work in Australia. In 1925, she completed a BA at the University of Western Australia (UWA), where she was introduced to the idea of social work by the head of psychology at the university. She was instrumental in establishing the national social work association and was involved in setting up the first social work (almoner) departments at several key hospitals as well as inducing the Catholic Archbishop to establish the Catholic Social Service Bureau. She was a key player among a small group of Catholic visionaries keen to develop a professional occupation specializing in helping people with their social functioning, following the upheavals of postwar Australia.
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Francois, Elma
Karene-Anne Nathaniel
Elma Francois (1897–1944) was renowned for her Afro-Caribbean activism against the deplorable living conditions of the poor in the British colonies of the English-speaking Caribbean. She led many public demonstrations to highlight the plight of persons living in poverty. She made her greatest contribution as one of the first women in the trade union movement in Trinidad. Francois worked as a community organizer in grass-roots communities, educating persons about the importance of exercising their voices. Her approach to community organizing followed what has been taught about Jane Addams’ Settlement House Movement, where she immersed herself in communities and built strong relationships with members so she could really understand their plight and so gain their trust. Unlike Addams, Francois was from a very deprived background and was not formally educated. She is renowned as the first woman to be charged and acquitted for sedition in Trinidad during the rise of the trade union movement.
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Human Rights and Social Work
Obie Clayton and June Gary Hopps
The National Association of Social Workers affirms a social worker’s responsibility to social change and social justice on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed peoples. Because of this directive around social justice, it is the profession’s responsibility to make connections among individual human rights issues within the broader social, economic, and cultural contexts that create conditions where injustice can take place. Social workers in the 21st century, especially those working at the policy or macro level, must be able to recognize and emphasize human rights in their practice and policy recommendations on local, national, and international levels. Social workers can bring attention to the need to craft solutions to human rights violations that take into account global human rights standards.
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Language Needs of Population Served
Samuel S. David, Priscilla Gibson, and Patience Togo Malm
Language mediates every aspect of social work, and the ability to communicate effectively with and about clients is a paramount responsibility that rests with the social worker. This responsibility extends to clients who do not speak, understand, read, or write fluently in the dominant language, either because they speak other languages or because of communication-related disabilities. This category may include individuals with learning disabilities, speech disorders, aphasia, autism spectrum disorders, specific language impairment, and physical impairments that impact language production, among other conditions. Primary concerns include disparities in access to services; the need for training on working with interdisciplinary teams; minimizing bias, micro-aggressions, and stereotyping; and issues related to translation, interpretation, and intercultural communication. In addition to these concerns, linguistically diverse populations are often excluded from research, resulting in gaps in knowledge about their needs. Service accommodations for language minorities tend to focus on translation and interpretation; however, research suggests that social workers also need to understand and guard against unconscious bias, and learn to use affirmative language to support the well-being of clients rather than pathologizing them. Clients with communication disabilities, on the other hand, may have distinct or overlapping needs, and service organizations rarely address the language support needs of these two populations within one unified framework. Service providers may waste precious time and effort navigating multiple, overlapping policy directives. Information on the policy context in the United States and the European Union related to language rights and language access provides a background for this topic.
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Environmental Justice
Gary Bryner
Environmental justice brings together two of the most powerful social movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, environmentalism and civil rights. Despite the success in reducing pollution and improving environmental quality in many areas, the reduction of race- and income-based disparities in environmental conditions, such as the levels of pollution to which individuals are exposed, has seen limited progress. Minority and low income communities continue to bear the brunt of environmental burdens. The idea of environmental justice also helps clarify the ethical issues underlying climate change and compels action to reduce the threat even in the face of uncertainties and to help poor nations with the costs of adapting to disruptive climate change. A major challenge in environmental justice is deciding how to define the problem. Five options for framing the issue of environmental justice capture most of the approaches taken by advocates and scholars. These are the civil rights framework; theories of distributive justice, fairness, and rights; the public participation framework, social justice framework, and ecological sustainability framework. These frameworks are not mutually exclusive. They overlap considerably and proponents of one primary framework may rely on elements of others as they frame the issues. Advocates of environmental justice will find that elements of each can contribute to their goal. No one framework is sufficient, but in recognizing where those with other views are coming from, we can develop opportunities for creative solutions that bring together alternative approaches.
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International Organization and Human Development
David C. Ellis
Human development as a concept seeks to make individuals the driving force behind state development. Even though international organizations (IOs) are formal agreements by and for the benefit of member states and have historically prioritized states’ interests, it can still be argued that human beings have long been the central concern of many IOs, even for some of the oldest surviving ones today. Nowadays, the human development framework appears to serve as the principal intellectual and normative construct regarding how to achieve national economic growth while building broad social justice and opportunity for individuals. Its allure derives as much from its coherent philosophical critique of past empirical development failures as it does from its incorporation of values and ethics appealing to a broad spectrum of professionals working in the development community. The human development approach was in part necessitated by the monopolization of economic development by states even from the advent of the enterprise in the 1950s. But despite the widespread adoption of the human development framework as an operative concept in the practice of development, it is not without controversy. Most of the critique is directed toward the underlying premises of the capabilities approach and the elements its adherents must elucidate in order to effectively implement its tenets in policy.
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Peace
Charles D. Cowger
This entry discusses the relationship of war and peace to social work practice. The historic and current mandate for social workers to work for peace is presented. The inevitable tie of war to everyday social work practice is described, and the relationship between social justice and peace is illustrated.
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Cultural Sensitivity in the Context of Cultural Humility
Robert M. Ortega and Roxanna Duntley-Matos
In social work practice, our ability to demonstrate culturally responsive service delivery has become a perennial challenge. The rapidly changing landscape in the context of cultural and linguistic diversity makes the urgency of establishing culturally inclusive professional practice more necessary. Evidence of its importance can be found in federal directives, state mandates and professional best practice guidelines that are undergirded by a recognition that responsive practice requires an awareness of cultural influences and manifest differences. This is particularly important as efforts to more fully engage with culturally responsive practice coincides with the push for a higher standard for professional caring to be culturally relevant. From a basic social science-informed perspective, culturally based experiences vary in such profound ways, both within and across groups and communities, that limiting practice to common or core sets of cultural meanings or shared practices for practice purposes merely minimizes the complexity of culture. Cultural experiences are experienced and expressed in complex and dynamic ways, and how cultural differences become framed has major implications for how they become recognized and incorporated into socially just practice. Various approaches to cultural sensitivity and institutional attachments appear in the literature although there is a particular need to uncover the many ways that a focus on cultural competence may impair our ability to embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty of cultural differences. Cultural humility offers a perspective that invites tolerance, inclusion, and diversity while promoting transformation, facilitation, and collaboration in knowledge development and in the search for cultural relevance in its social work application. It is a perspective that ultimately invites the sharing of both social opportunities and social fate, and is at the core of socially just empowerment
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Sanders, Daniel
Gloria Hegge
Daniel S. Sanders (1928–1989) was an educator and a leader in the field of international social work. Perhaps more than any other social worker, he promoted the social development perspective and encouraged social work educators to consider social development approaches.
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Teacher Activism in the United States
Kurt Stemhagen and Tamara Sober
There are a variety of ways in which teachers engage in activism. Teachers working for social change within their classrooms and teachers who engage in advocacy and organize to influence policy, law, and society are all doing work that falls under the umbrella of teacher activism. While there are numerous catalysts, many teachers become activists when they encounter unjust educational or social structures. There are also considerable obstacles to teachers recognizing their potential power as activists. From the gendered history of teaching to the widespread conception of teaching as a solitary and not a collective enterprise, there is rarely an easy path toward activism. The importance of collective as opposed to individual social action among teachers is increasingly recognized. Many cities now have teacher activist organizations, a group of which have come together and created a national coalition of teacher activist groups. Overall, teacher activism is an underresearched and undertheorized academic area of study. Possibilities for collective action should be fully explored.
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Australian Women’s Writing in Mid-Century Modernity
Susan Sheridan
Women seem barely visible in the lively Australian literary scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Popular wisdom has it that after the war women were sent home and imprisoned in domesticity, but this was not entirely true. Significant numbers earned a living, and gained popular success, writing historical fiction, children’s stories, feature journalism, and radio and television scripts, but the growing separation of literary from popular writing meant that their work lacked serious critical attention, and still does. Others did not achieve publication for years, while those who did were rarely recognized as significant artists. As a writing generation, these women, in particular the novelists, were eclipsed from view, both at the time and in subsequent histories. One reason for this is that they tended to be detached from prevailing debates about national identity and from traditional Left-Right oppositions. Their sense of the social responsibility of writers led them to explore topics and ideas that were outside the postwar political mainstream, such as conservation, peace, civil liberties, and Indigenous rights. Four case studies offer some illustration of the range of literary activities undertaken by these women writers, and allow a consideration of the ways in which they engaged with their social and cultural milieux: Kylie Tennant (1912–1988), Nancy Cato (1917–2000), Judith Wright (1915–2000), and Kath Walker/Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993).
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Social Justice and Equitable Systems in Education
Romina Madrid Miranda and Christopher Chapman
Social Justice is a term that encapsulates many of the problematic issues concerning modern societies. As a reflection of society, the concept has evolved to emphasize different aspects of fairness such as distribution or recognition. One often tacit but central element in this discussion is the articulation of social justice with the development of equitable education systems. In other words, what it means to pursue social justice in educational change and improvement.
To address this question, contemporary ideas of social justice can be brought into the field of educational change and improvement in a more intentional and explicit way to respond to the societal imperatives for justice in education. By tracing the evolution of the key conceptualizations of social justice rooted in political philosophy, it is possible to examine its implications for educational and systemic transformation. Furthermore, from a systems perspective, understanding the ecology of equity can offer important insights into the interplay between schools, education systems, and wider society. The exploration of experiences and approaches in education that aim to disrupt inequities can be used to propose a number of key principles to guide educational change efforts from a social justice perspective, aiming to foster more equitable educational systems.
These principles serve to unpack issues of social justice and move to a more complex and action-oriented perspective that places distribution, recognition, and representation as key to developing more equitable education systems. The six principles are: a focus on learning and teaching; a commitment to collaboration and networking; the use of inquiry, research, and evidence; understanding the contextual nature of justice; investing in support and agency; and
building leadership capacity. The notion of a networked learning system and how this perspective can advance the discourse toward a more explicit agenda for developing socially just approaches in educational research, policymaking, and practice is also helpful. The overarching goal is to stimulate dialogue and action aimed at creating more equitable educational systems that prioritize social justice principles in all facets of education.
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An Overview of Qualitative Inquiry in Curriculum Studies
Gabriel Huddleston and M. Francyne Huckaby
The relationships between curriculum studies and qualitative inquiry are built upon similar trajectories and theoretical concerns. There are key points in the histories of both of these inter/trans(un)disciplinary fields, the work of certain scholars working in both, and shared concerns. Historically, the lineage of curriculum studies and qualitative inquiry intersect around a shared investigation of education, specifically in schools. Of note is the common turn away from (post)positivism and an attentiveness to emic forms of inquiry that seek to understand from the inside out. Some commonalities include, but are not limited to, currere, duoethnography, autobiography, and broader qualitative research. Comparing the journey of curriculum studies and its qualitative forms of inquiry to traveling through the universe, travel begins on a home planet, reaching the farthest reaches of spaces, but a return is required, or at the very least, eventually inevitable. In the case of curriculum studies, explorers return to curriculum and, therefore, education. As curriculum has expanded beyond questions of knowledge to include the lives of those experiencing curriculum, qualitative inquiry has been a constant and loyal companion forging a journey that does not require one land at the place from which one launched.
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Educating Teachers for High-Poverty Schools
Bruce Burnett and Jo Lampert
A great deal of scholarship informs the idea that specific teacher preparation is required for working in high-poverty schools. Many teacher-education programs do not focus exclusively on poverty. However, a growing body of research emphasizes how crucial it is that teachers understand the backgrounds and communities in which young people and their families live, especially if they are to teach equitably, without bias, and with a critical understanding of historical educational disadvantage. Research on teacher education for high-poverty schools is largely associated with social-justice education and premised on two key assumptions. The first is that teachers do make a difference and should be encouraged to see themselves as agents of change. The second is that without nuanced knowledge of poverty and disadvantage, and especially its intersection with race, teachers are prepared as though all students and all communities have equal social advantage. Through targeted teacher education, social justice teachers aquire the knowledge, skills and attributes to understand what they can and cannot do. Teachers with strong communities of practice and agency can resist the idea that they can eradicate poverty on their own, but can enact teaching in ways that are equitable and respectful, culturally responsive and safe. It is increasingly possible to observe how debates propose or challenge how preservice teachers should learn about high-poverty contexts. There are also numerous models, globally, of what works in preparing teachers for high-poverty schools; however, providing evidence or proving how specialized teacher preparation affects the educational outcomes of high-poverty students is difficult.
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Community-Based Participatory Research
Michael Duke
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) refers to a methodological and epistemological approach to applied community projects in which researchers and community members collaborate as equals in the research process. Also known as participatory action research (PAR), CBPR has gained considerable acceptance both as a set of methods for identifying and addressing local issues of concern and as a vehicle for applying the principles of equity, cultural humility, mutual learning, and social justice to the relationships between researchers and communities. Although somewhat distinct from applied anthropology, CBPR shares with ethnography in particular an attentiveness to rapport building and community engagement and an overall validation of local knowledge. There is little consensus regarding the threshold of community participation necessary for a given research project to be considered CBPR. However, at a minimum the approach requires that community members define the problems to be assessed, provide consultation on the cultural and social dimensions of the study population, and serve in an advisory capacity over the entire project. The history of CBPR and its antecedents reflects its twin values as a pragmatic approach to researching and addressing local problems and as an emancipatory social justice project that seeks to diminish the hierarchical relationship between researchers and community members. Specifically, the pragmatic perspective was developed in the United States by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1930s (and subsequently by the anthropologists Laura Thompson and Sol Tax), while the emancipatory approach derives from the work of educational theorist Paulo Freire in Brazil in the 1970s. Community Advisory Boards (CABs) play an outsized role in the success of CBPR projects, since they typically represent the community in these studies, and thus maintain oversight over all aspects of the research process, including the study design, sampling and recruitment protocols, and the dissemination of findings. Accordingly, nurturing and maintaining trust between researchers, the CAB, and the community constitutes a foundational practice for any CBPR study.